Think about all the other things you could do with the time you spend getting your email ducks in a row. If you can get through two weeks, you might as well keep going. If you can get through a week without clearing your inbox, you can get through two weeks. If you have an iPhone, go to your notification settings and turn off badges for whichever email app you use so that irritating counter goes away. If you're interested in giving this lifestyle a shot, I recommend giving it a week. A lugubrious inbox situation doesn't have to bring you down. Practically useless as I think it might be, the satisfaction is not lost on me.īut I'm here to tell you that you can let go. There are only so many things in this life that we have complete control over, and mass-deleting digital missives with no relevance to you is an easy way to take power over your life. I understand why people feel the need to keep their inboxes spotless. This can be you if you just ignore that email counter. But if that's all you do to help save the planet, consider making bigger life changes. If you want to clean up your email act to reduce your carbon footprint, I get it. However, that carbon footprint is minuscule when compared to worse polluters like flying or driving. Once I get to that point, I'll do what's necessary and nothing more.Īnd as a last note, I'll acknowledge that email storage has a carbon footprint just like any other internet activity. This is the one of the best reasons to clear out an inbox. The little guys aren't hurting anybody.īefore I move on, yes, I know services like Gmail have storage space limits. I get absolutely nothing from combing through my inbox to weed out what I don't need. This is justifiable in my mind because likes and retweets give me validation for my terrible posts. I still do that on Twitter because that hellhole holds outsized importance in my life. When you open Twitter or Facebook, the first thing you probably do is clear out notifications, right? We've been conditioned over the years to treat numerical buildup as a nuisance. I tried to keep the number of unnecessary messages in my inbox as close to zero as possible because it felt like the right thing to do. Everyone's brain works differently, but for me, I just can't be bothered to fuss about with an obstacle as fleeting and intangible as a messy inbox. As I said earlier, if I need to find something, I can just search for it. Meticulously clearing out your email inbox doesn't, or at least not enough to make me care. In other words, these acts come with practical benefits. And aside from looking nice, an organized bookshelf makes things easier to find. It's uncomfortable, inconvenient, and disgusting in the worst scenarios to exist in a dirty room. When you tidy up the living room or organize your bookshelf in alphabetical order, there are good reasons for it. If you're on the fence about your inbox curation habits, allow me to make the case why you should just let go. The same goes for never deleting emails you've already read. You have better things to do than to click through and delete that nonsense, and there are legitimate reasons not to do it. Let's be real, most of those unread emails are for newsletters you signed up for ages ago or glorified Postmates ads that aren't a great deal anyhow. It really, truly, matters little if you let your personal inbox pile up with thousands of unread emails. I'm here to tell you it doesn't because that little red counter is a jerk who needs to mind its own business. Once that little red counter next to the Mail icon hits a high enough number, you convince yourself it's a problem that needs to be solved. We generally consider it lazy, inefficient, and overall burdensome to let your inbox grow and fester to the point of chaos. It brings us down, in part, because we let it. Just like most of the modern internet, it's a curse that may have seemed like an exhilarating new communication tool at one point, but has only become a source of daily stress. And if not, chill.Įmail is a burden on our lives. We all have our ways, but we may just convince you to change yours. Mashable's new series Don't Me takes unpopular opinions and backs them up with.reasons.
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